Can we make a better flu vaccine? This San Diego biotech says yes

A San Diego biotech is working on a new way to produce seasonal flu vaccine that could speed up the process and provide better protection against infection.

Vaccine manufacturing time can ultimately be reduced from the current six to nine months to several weeks, said Oliver Fetzer, CEO of Synthetic Genomics.

The first step in vaccine manufacture, transmission and production of “seed” flu viruses, has been reduced from 35 days to less than 5 days in a proof of concept study.

The digitized biological information can be quickly adjusted to make vaccines for new or developing strains.

A prototype machine that turns computer code into biological material could eventually make the vaccine directly from the digitized information.

Flu vaccine production: Here’s the full story

A San Diego biotech is working on a new way to produce seasonal flu vaccine that could speed up the process and provide better protection against infection.

The seasonal flu vaccine takes months to prepare, and its effectiveness is low. Most flu vaccine is produced today in a process invented more than 70 years ago, using fertile chicken eggs.

San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics is working on how to speed it up by digitizing the manufacturing process.

By electronically transmitting virus data at the speed of light to computerized manufacturing centers, vaccine manufacturing time can ultimately be reduced from six to nine months to several weeks, said Oliver Fetzer, CEO of Synthetic Genomics.

If Synthetic Genomics is successful, flu vaccines of the future will more closely track the changes in flu strains. This will help avoid the embarrassing and dangerous misses of recent years, when the vaccine failed to protect against the rapidly mutating virus.

This season’s flu outbreak is the worst since the 2009 swine flu pandemic. In San Diego County, the flu has killed 174 people as Jan. 24. And not coincidentally, this season’s vaccine is only about 30 percent effective.

Moreover, faster flu vaccine production would come in handy in case of a dangerous outbreak, like the horrifying Spanish flu pandemic of 100 years ago. It infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide, one-third of the population, killing 20 million to 50 million.

Researchers have already shown that this digital method can shorten the first stage of production from 35 days to fewer than five days. The first step — making the virus “seed” used as a base for the vaccine — was demonstrated in 2013. That proof of concept study was performed by a team including researchers from Synthetic Genomics, the J. Craig Venter Institute and Novartis.

“We’ve shown with Novartis that we could dramatically compress the time it takes from getting the sequence of a new viral strain identified in China, and then make the synthetic seed for that vaccine in a matter of days,” Fetzer said Thursday.

Last year, Synthetic Genomics announced it had developed a prototype machine that could further extend this digitizing process, along with general purpose manufacture of biological substances.

The machine produces DNA, RNA, protein and viral particles, according to information fed in digitally. It’s supplied with the raw materials, and then acts according to the information to assemble the biological substances. In theory, this machine could be used to directly make the vaccine.

The chicken egg method, the most commonly used, is considerably lower tech. The process was invented more than 70 years ago.

Selected viral seed strains are used to infect millions of the fertile eggs, which must be produced under carefully controlled conditions. Fluid from the eggs is processed to make either killed-virus vaccine or weakened live virus. The number of eggs produced must be decided on months in advance, which renders the process incapable of being quickly adjusted in case of need.

The digital to biological synthesizer could supplant the egg method once it is refined enough, Fetzer said. That would allow a vaccine to be made from start to finish in several weeks.

“Instead of going into the egg-based production, if you could load (the digitized information) right onto one of our machines, then you could get to a point where you could start manufacturing and have it made,” Fetzer said.

And if more vaccine is needed, the synthesizer could make a new supply quickly, which is not possible once the season’s supply of flu vaccine eggs is exhausted.

However, more work needs to be done before this method can be used in human flu vaccines. Synthetic Genomics must demonstrate that the machine can work at the accuracy and scale needed to make the seasonal vaccine. Getting it ready for clinical use is a few years away, Fetzer said.

The Food and Drug Administration has launched a crackdown on clinics hawking stem cell treatments for a range of ailments. (September 1, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)

The Food and Drug Administration has launched a crackdown on clinics hawking stem cell treatments for a range of ailments. (September 1, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)

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Researchers used eggs from healthy females and the sperm of a man who carried a gene mutation that causes inherited hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. (Aug. 3, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)

Researchers used eggs from healthy females and the sperm of a man who carried a gene mutation that causes inherited hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. (Aug. 3, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)